Haiku’s latest activity report is here, and while there’s a lot of stuff in there – as usual – I think the Gtk work stands out this month.
After all that work, GTK3 worked “well enough” that it seemed ready for general consumption (or at least testing), so waddlesplash committed the necessary changes to HaikuPorts for Xlibe to be packaged, and then GTK3, and then finally the first GTK3 application: Inkscape. Already, GIMP has followed closely on its tail thanks to 3dEyes (with some quick fixes to Xlibe done by waddlesplash for it), and more GTK3 applications are sure to follow once the HaikuPorts team gets caught up to speed on things.
You can find screenshots on the forums of both GIMP and Inkscape running on Haiku. With that, waddlesplash has deemed the “GTK3 porting adventure” complete, and has returned to development work on Haiku’s core for this coming month.
That’s a lot of progress, and two great applications to have running on Haiku.
That’s awesome! The more software the merrier. I’ll have to try it and see how native it feels.
While it’s nice the OS has more apps, they don’t look or behave like native apps. At that point, with the unique elements of haiku not there, there is no reason to use it over Linux..
I disagree.
Haiku, as a desktop-only OS with no other ambitions, has the potential to offer a way more integrated and coherent desktop experience than Linux is capable of as it is today.
As someone who uses desktop Linux for the past 20 years, and had used BeOS, the sad fact is: Linux is still far away from being a good desktop OS, and barely match today a 21 years old dead OS like BeOS in user experience.
Worse, I saw a strange tendency of some major Linux desktop projects to make choices that actually makes their desktop experience to regress “in the name of a better architecture”, and engage in insane refactoring, spending 5… 10… 15 years as a utter mess, meanwhile sending their users thru a calvary, just to regain the same stability and feature parity that their former self once had.
The KDE project is a excellent example of that, archiving only 4 years ago roughly the same level of user experience that we could enjoy with KDE3 (abandoned in 2008). And that is all over the place with GNOME as well.
The fact that we are in the year 2022 still attempting to breed a decent sound server (basic functionality on a desktop OS since at least the year 1995) with another replacement in line (Pipewire) says a lot about the current state of affairs as far as Linux desktop experience is concerned. Don’t even get me started on Wayland or these attempts to make “unified” software management with flatpak and snap…
I assume you’re talking about PulseAudio. I’ve heard many people complain about it but it just works for me, and it sounds like you know more than I do… 🙂
In what way is PulseAudio not a decent sound server? What is an example of a sound server in another OS that is decent? What is PulseAudio missing that would make it decent?
EDIT: I just read about PipeWire on Wikipedia, it sounds great! I run Arch Linux so I may try it out. I’d still love to hear any insights you have too.
I was talking more about the general Linux desktop state as a whole, the audio server was just a example.
More specifically, the tendency of major desktop projects doing sharp turns that massively regress the desktop experience for years without regard for their own users, just to get back to the same place that they used to be, while there’s fundamental problems with core parts of what would constitute a desktop OS that just drags on.
But about specifically the PulseAudio: do you know when it was released? 2006. It was boasted as the replacement of aRts and ESD. Both GNOME and KDE projects, along with major distributions, embraced it as a default way too fast while being fully aware that it was VERY unstable, borderline unusable, back then. It took 10 years to become stable!!
They replaced stable and functional solutions for a experimental stuff with a “better architecture” instead of doing a conservative and incremental migration path for a critical component (as if it was just a technical decision to force “filthy developers resisting it” to migrate otherwise it would never be stable) , and forced their users to endure FOR NEARLY A ENTIRE DECADE the plight of living with a sound server that crashed all the time.
Don’t get me wrong, Pulseaudio was a major achievement, and going back to 2006, Linux audio had issues that descended as far as into the kernel (for example, ALSA mixer API was a mess, rtkit was still a dream, udev hot-plug notifications…). But how it was pushed really made Linux bleed users. And that was not even the single breaking “turn” of major desktop components back then.
How do you explain to a common user that a basic functionality that was over there and working for him is now broken (not even gone, just broken)? That his distro upgrade was not really a upgrade giving him life quality improvements but a regression?
How do you convince business, governments and schools out there to replace their Windows desktops acting like that? You can’t. You can’t even create the tools to do proper desktop fleet management that way.
It’s odd the the #1 Kernel development rule (we don’t regress) that made Linux a absolute success on the server and embedded markets is not applied by major desktop projects and distros (the ones pretending to target “the common user”, not Arch or Gentoo) at all.
If it is to keep doing what was done so far, let’s just stop the pretense that Linux is a desktop OS for general population (like Windows and MacOS) and just call it “desktop OS for power-users only” and give up.
We will never be a viable replacement for Windows for 99% of the population if we continue with the current behavior. I say “we” because I’m a desktop Linux user, a KDE user.
About Pipewire, give it a spin, it works really well. And it’s a example of how a proper migration should be handled.
Thank you for the reply and info. 🙂
This is plain wrongheaded… and has been proven wrong by the existence of things like WSL and Wine.
Even windows with as large a software catalog as it has… needs WSL.
Its completely impractical to play games on Linux without Wine/Proton.
Haiku has these same issues to an even greater degree, if someone wants to create an excellent native application that uses Haiku to the fullest thats great, but people need other software in the meantime.
Also to be entirely fair… Haiku should implement wayland in its app server… as well as fully integrate Linux’s graphics drivers, not doing so is helping nobody.
@Adurbe
Is there any reason why you couldn’t use these GTK themes and icons with those applications on Haiku?
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1012423/
https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Haiku
Admittedly they won’t function exactly the same as Haiku applications but by looking pretty much the same it’ll be less jarring.
Qt apps don’t work exactly like native apps on Haiku, but they look fine to me.
i just wish haiku os would work with my raspberry pi 400.